I have a long standing history with
sitting through presentations. From sitting in a high school classroom, to
college level classes, and even through my current job in Education, I believe
that I am well versed in what a good presentation entails. To me, a good
presentation involves a few key points including design and layout, the way you
speak, and determining what information is important to the audience.
Design and layout of a presentation
should be clear and interesting, free from distraction and wordiness. It is
very boring to sit through a presentation that is filled with the run of the
mill current PowerPoint slides that everybody uses. It is even worse to sit
through a PowerPoint filled with enough words to fill every slide. Through my
experience in Education, I know that people have short attention spans and do
not enjoy wordiness. People like to hear the ‘point’ and move on to the next
idea.
Next, I think that a good
presentation entails a good public speaker. Nobody likes to listen to somebody
who has a monotone voice. Part of being a good public speaker means not saying
words like, “um”, or “like”. This contributes to wordiness as well as making
you sound like you do not know what you are talking about. Also, it makes it
difficult for the listener to follow what you are saying.
Finally, it is important to keep
your audience in mind when you are giving a presentation. This is important because
you need to be able to give the information that they need without anything extra. For example, I don’t know
how many presentations that I have attended where the presenter was giving
information that should already been known. This, in my opinion, makes the
presentation a waste of time.
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